The Colorado Ouroboros: How 14er Trail Use Came Full Circle

With the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative poised to release their 2024 trail use report, Quandary Magazine examines current trail use trends, and how hikers have come to mirror pre-pandemic habits

The Colorado Fourteeners Initiative is poised to release their 2024 use report, which gives us a great snapshot of trail access and hiking habits. As local governments tinker with paid permits and access restrictions, this data gives us a good look at whether those policies are helping — or harming the outdoor community.

When organizing all my past research to prep for this year’s installment, I realized I was on hiatus when last year’s numbers came out. In the interest of completeness, I’ve decided to do a quick breakdown of the missing numbers, search for new trends, and set us up to better understand the upcoming data.

The Big Picture

Colorado’s 14ers have come full circle, with 2023 garnering the exact same number of hiker use days¹ as 2015 — the first year for which accurate data is available. Since the COVID-era boom in outdoor recreation, these visitor numbers have fallen well below the previous baseline.

What’s less clear is whether COVID (and the response to it) reversed the growth hiking community’s growth, or if it was simply an outlier in the overall trend.

When I first started crunching the trail use numbers, we didn’t have a lot of data points to paint a clear picture. Now, we’re starting to see some longer-term trends over close to a decade in time.

To complete this article, I’ve boiled down 9 years of trail use data into just a few nifty graphs. As always, I want to make the data transparent and available to you. All of the raw numbers can be found below in one convenient PDF:

Colorado Hiker Use Days Raw Data

497KB ∙ PDF file

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I’ve also linked my three previous iterations of this report, in case you’re curious about how my analysis has held up over time:

• 2022 — Quandary Collapse

• 2021 — The “Not Trails”

• 2020 — The Alpine Amusement Park

The Nitty Gritty

This year’s numbers raise some interesting questions, which I hope to be able to answer in the coming weeks. The first example is a kind of herding trend. Colorado’s most popular peaks started off roughly equal in terms of popularity, before clear favorites started emerging.

Now they’re back almost exactly where they started, with the exception of the DeCaLiBron loop. But due to the land use quagmire surrounding this particular trail, I don’t think this is a reliable data point.